The Fire Fighter

by Francis Cottam

  ‘Stay.’ Nevin whispered. He gathered his bowed head in the sanctity of his hands and spoke through the grill of his fingers. ‘Please stay, Jack. If you go, I’ve no other fucker to talk to. Stay a bit?’

  ‘I’ll stay,’ Finlay said, folding his reluctant body back into the discomfort of his seat.

  Finlay was dozing on his cot when he heard the double rap of Babcock’s urgent knock. He had eaten treacle tart for pudding with Nevin that both men agreed, in sufficient quantity, would have made a more than adequate road surface. He had walked the pudding off on the journey to the gym behind the Strand and had exercised there hard, with a picture of Rebecca Lange painted on his mind as he limbered and heaved over the gymnastics apparatus and the mat. Spent from his gym work, sore and satisfied from the massage that followed it, he had walked to Camomile Street and been surprised, despite himself, to see an enormous roll of tarpaulin being winched slowly, inch by inch, by a civilian works crew up the face of Absalom House. The black fabric cracked with tar paint in the grip of the hawsers binding it. A crowd gathered, mostly brokers in top hats and frock coats shiny at the elbow, to observe this spectacle through a thin drizzle of October rain.

  Babcock entered the room without waiting for an invitation to follow his knock and Finlay saw from his urgency that something was very much up. He got off the cot and started to pull on his boots.

  ‘North Sea Coastguard reports a substantial number of aircraft flying in strict formation on a bearing for London.’

  ‘What about our fighters?’

  ‘They’re flying with an escort of more than fifty fighters. Fighter bombers too. Sounds like most of the bloody Luftwaffe is airborne. Looks like being the biggest raid yet. They’ll be over their target in about twenty minutes.’

  And their target is us, Finlay thought. He looked at his watch. In twenty minutes it would be dark.

  ‘You know the drill, Chief Fire Officer,’ Babcock said.

  He did. He was supposed to stay in his cell until Babcock summoned him or the telephone rang. He was instructed to remain on alert. He thought about the tarp he had seen being winched upward in Camomile Street. Winched through a thin rain. Had the tarp been secured? Had the rain strengthened to make the Absalom dome slippery and treacherous, the job impossible? Rain would embrace the city in blankets of damp brick and leaf-choked runnels, clogged gutters, dripping eaves. But even a deluge would not easily douse fire ignited in the dry heart of a building, deep beneath its pierced roof, fire burning scattered, jelloid, fierce against wood-panelled wall, across polished floorboards, in among the brittle debris of broken furnishings, amok in the paper ruin of archives and files. As he sat in his tunic and boots and speculated on the dumb chaos to come, hundreds of feet above him, Finlay felt sweat gather at his hairline and trickle down into his eyebrows. He felt a trill of panic and looked at the two air feeds emerging from the ceiling as if to ensure that they were still there. He well knew how fire could rob the air of oxygen. The worry of being entombed by tons of rubble was newer to him, but part of the same debilitating cycle of anxiety he found visited him now that he was forced to wait rather than to respond instantly to crisis.

  Finlay had seen this debilitation again and again on the faces of people in the streets. He had mistaken the pinched exhaustion into which it pulled their features for the look of capitulation. He had mistaken their weary appreciation of what resistance was going to cost for resignation and even for defeat. It occurred to him now, deaf to the rumble of aircraft delivering their random spillage of death, that Londoners were a long way from defeat. It was knowing the strength and obduracy of their own resistance that made them so wretchedly grim. They were in it for the long haul. They might very well die. Probably they would be obliged to grieve. Many had died and more still were grieving already. Suffering was their certainty, made absolute by the certain knowledge that they were not going to surrender.

  By birth a Liverpudlian, Finlay had a Liverpudlian’s ambivalence about the capital. But deep beneath the pavements they trod, deaf to the air-raid siren’s ugly ululation, admiration seeped into his soul, now, for the stubborn natives of this city, as he sweated under his tunic and waited for the coming of his call. His realization made Finlay wish that he were commanding a fire crew in Silvertown or Rotherhithe, where the bombs aimed against the docks so often dropped instead into the cramped terraces adjacent to their yards and quaysides and warehouses. He could do genuine good there. He could deploy men and machinery to save lives and, where lives weren’t threatened, to salvage stored and bonded stockpiles of precious rations.

  He waited for his call. He sweated inside his tunic. He tried and failed to hear the remotest hint of the carnage filling his imagination from above. He fixed his eyes on the clumsy black reality of the telephone on the night table beside the cot on which he sat. With a sudden wrench of his torso he reached and pulled the receiver free of its cradle and pressed it against the side of his face. No dialling tone. Silence. The implement was dead. Finlay heard silence and pictured that silence dumb and black in the pitch of his mind.

  He took the reaching spiral of iron steps two and three at a time until the steps began to jounce and sing beneath his booted feet with the vibration of the bombs. He could feel the volume of the bombs vibrating through his clenched teeth. Then he could hear them. Then he could hear nothing else, not even his own urgent breathing or the clank of his climbing feet, the rumble and thunder of bombs – all cordite and powder and dust – drifting into his nostrils with the stench of fire and the smell of steam from playing hoses as he gained the bright, burning surface, gasping, awed.

  To Finlay, it seemed the sky itself was on fire. Gobs dripped molten from the sky and flames licked across its width. Then a great gout of flame gushed, giving him perspective, and he saw that the glass roof of the station reflected the fire burning on the tracks and platforms and cavorting, crimson, through the shattered windows and doors of train carriages. Rows of entire trains blazed like so many logs in a festive grate. The station awning burned too, panes melting and glass raining through the hiss of playing hoses as the crews beneath were forced to cower and dodge. Heat, fierce, roaring heat, forced Finlay to look away from the station and he turned towards Bishopsgate and saw the buildings there, monolithic and strange, lit for a moment by bomb blast and then gone, an after-image and then an orange dimness etched by the station fire. Above, in the real sky, Finlay could hear the drone of massed engines and see the play of searchlights and the white, staccato brilliance of tracer shells stretched in lines across the night. Above all this, the night had cleared and he could make out stars in constellations smudged by the black bulk of shifting bombers.

  Coming to himself, he looked over towards the darkness above the triangle of streets containing the buildings in his charge. Nothing there glowed. No sparks or embers climbed and drifted. He could not have heard the clamour of a fire crew, but he strained to hear it anyway. As far as he was able to tell, the sound of the bombers was receding towards targets to the south-west; to the power station at Battersea and the great conglomeration of rails and rolling stock at Clapham Junction. He felt a tap on the shoulder and turned to see Nevin. Or rather he saw Nevin’s eyes, the rest of Nevin’s face soot black under his helmet in the orange firelight.

  ‘Evening, Enrol.’

  ‘Fuck me,’ Finlay said. ‘Al Jolson.’

  ‘They’ve hit every main-line station,’ Nevin said. ‘Every single one.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  Nevin smeared soot around his face to no noticeable effect with the back of one hand. The hand shook and in the firelight Finlay could see that the Moorgate man’s eyes were veined with fatigue.

  ‘Wouldn’t Noel Coward object?’

  ‘Noel who?’

  ‘Your pal in the Paisley pyjamas.’

  ‘Very good,’ Finlay said. ‘Very funny.’

  ‘Most of the rolling stock is a write-off,’ Nevin said, suddenly serious, nodding towards the burning rai
lway station. ‘One civilian nightwatchman dead. Two railwaymen dead. Three fire crew dead.’

  ‘From?’

  ‘Two from Mile End. One of mine. Sweeney.’

  ‘Water mains?’

  ‘It’d be a hell of a way to go, wouldn’t it? Drowning under a blanket on an Underground platform.’

  ‘You’d have plenty of company.’

  ‘We can’t keep getting away with it. But the answer is no. No mains ruptured. Not tonight.’

  ‘What happened to Sweeney?’

  Nevin looked down at the road over his folded arms and spat.

  ‘You’re familiar with sprinkler systems?’

  ‘With the theory.’

  ‘Yank bullion company owns a building behind the station. Equipped with sprinklers. Usual bogus fucking rumour about trapped personnel. I designate four men. Sweeney goes in at the head. Sprinklers activate. Only the tank that supplies the sprinklers is directly over the seat of the fire.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘He smelled like boiled ham by the time we got him out,’ Nevin said. ‘Boiled ham is what he looked like, too. Though I don’t suppose I’ll be telling that to his nearest and dearest.’

  ‘Is there nothing I can do?’

  Nevin looked at him and his eyes narrowed in his soot black face.

  ‘We’re pretty near to November the fifth,’ he said. ‘Maybe next time you could bring along a box of sparklers and some treacle toffee. My lads would appreciate that.’

  Six

  It was seven o’clock in the morning by the time Finlay descended the spiral of iron steps to the cell in which he was quartered and where he was supposed to wait for the call to sound from his dead telephone. His descent was weary. He felt in every bone and sinew the exhaustion of spent adrenalin followed by dull routine performed in conditions that contrived to be mundane while carrying, always, the potential for death. In a sense, in his occupation, it had always been thus. The blackened walls and torn roofs of burned buildings always held the poised threat of collapse. Unearthing cellars and exploring basements in the search for trapped survivors had always been deeply uneasy work. But Finlay found that the unexploded bombs, the duds and incendiaries and the mines, sleeping and volatile, required a new level of wariness. The bomb risk did not just pervade, it threatened at moments to overwhelm the teams of tired fire fighters in spasms of hysteria and fast, deep currents of panic. Despite Nevin’s levity, Finlay had stayed. He had spent the night clearing debris in danger of disintegration, and damping down. His arms ached from the effort of training the brass nozzle of a water-swollen hose over the smouldering innards of buildings and dowsing the skeletal glow and spark of Liverpool Street Station’s train wreckage. His head ached from the stink of burning rubber and his eyes wept in protest at the greasy billow of its smoke.

  Towards the dawn he had walked along Bishopsgate towards Houndsditch and taken a look at each of the five buildings in his care. They had been so close to the violence visited on the fabric of the city the previous night. But each of his buildings still stood. Each occupied its given position in still and massive indifference to the havoc only a few hundred yards away. They aim their bombs very well, Finlay thought. His head thumped dully with the brilliance of last night’s explosions and his throat was raw with a cindertrack thirst. But the thought came to him with gloomy clarity. The enemy were getting better with every raid at their blind navigation of the night metropolis. They were aiming their bombs very well indeed.

  ‘My God, look at you,’ Grey said.

  ‘A sight for sore eyes and no mistake,’ Babcock said, ‘Lummy.’

  ‘That bar of Palmolive gone already?’ Grey lay stretched the length of Finlay’s cot with one hand on the pillow behind his head and the other holding a cigarette poised in front of his face. He appeared to be looking at the end of the cigarette, as if studying the rate at which it burned. Finlay saw that there were at least twenty cigarette butts in a zinc ashtray placed on the night table beside his redundant telephone. Tobacco smoke blurred the light in the upper reaches of the room and Finlay was aware of its taste, thin and sour on top of all the other things he had recently been obliged to inhale. Grey wore a white shirt and a loosened tie and suit trousers held up by braces. His feet were crossed and his trouser crease ran smooth from his thigh to the tip of his topmost shoe.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind if I smoke,’ he said.

  Babcock sat in the armchair, polishing Finlay’s shoes. A shoe covered one of his hands, he held a cloth in the other, and Finlay thought he had never seen such a shine on the toecap of a shoe as he saw now. Grey’s shoes were suede, which it occurred to him was odd, in a military man, but perhaps not so odd in a pansy. Finlay saw that Grey’s suit coat had been hung by a hanger on a hook. Behind it, on a separate hanger, hung the suit they had given him, what he could see of it looking freshly pressed and brushed.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Take that tunic off and scrub up, why don’t you, while Babcock here gets some of the rough off it,’ Grey said. ‘Babcock’s a wizard with a brush, aren’t you, Babcock?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Finlay said again.

  ‘You and I are going for a spot of breakfast.’

  Finlay rubbed the flat of his hand over his shorn hair. ‘Feels more like dinner-time to me.’

  ‘You don’t want breakfast?’

  ‘What I’d like is a pint of beer.’

  ‘Capital,’ Grey said. There was a hard glitter in his eyes that Finlay did not like. Grey rose from the bed and shrugged his coat from its hanger. ‘Don’t I know just the place.’

  A drizzle was dousing, with gentle relentlessness, those smouldering remnants the fire fighters had failed to, when the two men gained the streets. Rain damped the smell of night destruction and did something to sweeten the bitter air. But the grey light brought by the rain inflicted a sodden atmosphere of wet depression and turned defeat from a foreboding into something Finlay felt he could almost touch.

  ‘I know,’ Grey said, breathing deeply, perhaps in an effort at exorcising nicotine and tar from tainted lungs. ‘And it will get worse, believe me, before it starts to get better.’

  Finlay did not think the remark worthy of reply. Nor did he think the insight that had prompted it remarkable. Trudging the wet, uneven pavements towards Wapping and the river, he had the strong sense that London was its own universe and his sentiments universal; shared unspoken by the huddles of slowly drenching men he saw toiling to restore what was no longer; engaged, all of them, in attempting to revive a thing they reluctantly knew to be already dead.

  ‘It is always like this,’ Grey said. ‘Custom and habit are made concrete in the places we build to work and live among. The destruction seems at odds with what ought to be. A shift in the natural order. An obscenity, almost, because it so flouts the fragility of what we think are our solid foundations. A thing like this violates us. It confounds our faith.’

  ‘Like Gommecourt Wood?’

  Grey did not break stride. He sniffed savagely at the air and then hawked from corrupted lungs and spat towards the gutter.

  ‘It was at Gommecourt Wood you lost your faith,’ Finlay persisted.

  Grey turned to him. His eyes were green and anger glittered in them despite the absence of light.

  ‘It wasn’t Gommecourt Wood, Chief Fire Officer, though Gommecourt was close enough. And it wasn’t faith I lost. It was hope.’

  They walked. Finlay tried to remember what London had smelled like before the war. Smoke had always been a strong part of it, of course. Smoke had embraced the city, snug almost, from the fires that heated people’s homes, the coal furnaces that fired much of its industry, its oil-burning boilers and the mountains of coke that kept the heating pipes of its schools singing with warmth through desolate winters. There had been braziers to warm the working men on every building site and the smell of chestnuts was always present in the autumn, cracking with heat at the heart of braziers mounted on the chestnut
sellers’ West End stalls. Smoke from a million cigarettes had mingled nightly in the West End of the city with the more subtle, sweeter scent of perfume. In pockets of the city there had been the bitter smells of poverty and damp, and in the listlessness of summer sometimes the Thames would smell like the sewer the Victorians had allowed it to become in their proud and bustling civic midst. The city had smelled of horses, of course, and horse shit, in Petticoat Lane and Clerkenwell and Lower Marsh and Essex Road and all the other places where there were workshops and market stalls and the choking flux of trade and manufacture. Fleet Street and the Strand and Piccadilly had smelled of the burnt oil and petrol vapour of the motor car and the bus. Ozone had showered sometimes in a sour, singeing odour from the electric cables that guided London’s tram cars over track and cobble. The fogs had mingled all of these smells into what Finlay thought of now as a comfort blanket of warmth and recognition under which the city had snuggled; sightless, safe, cosy in a dim reverie of secure celebration of its unchanging manner and custom and status in the world. The smell of London had been the smell of ritual, of celebration, of enterprise and sometimes of sleep. London had smelled of life; a life, for the most part, successfully lived. That smell, of course, was gone.

  They came across a tea wagon on a corner in Cable Street. Two women were tending the wagon. Both wore their yellow hair in a garish flush extending across their shoulders from a scarf tied over the top of the head. Finlay had thought this fashion strange, almost tribal, when first he had seen it, worn by a woman skulking in an Aldwych doorway sneaking a cigarette during the black-out. It was ubiquitous, he had since realized. But he still thought it strange. The women tending the tea wagon wore bright lipstick in crimson, waxy smiles that smudged their teeth. Steam escaped upwards from the pressure valve on the big copper urn mounted on their wagon and when they poured tea into a mug from a tap at the base of the urn it smelled wonderful in the ash and damp of the morning.

  Finlay sensed that Grey was tempted to stop. They slowed and he looked at the people queuing for tea. Most of them were old. They had mouths crimped around toothless gums and the eye sockets were too deep in their pinched, bony faces for Finlay easily to read their expressions. They waited in a motionless shuffle for their moment at the urn and their portion of its black, sugarless beverage.